Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

The other thing he left out was the presence of the federal agent. It wasn't necessarily a favor. Nick still didn't know what agency this Fitzgerald guy was from. And other than following similar shooting reports, he had no idea why the hell the guy was here. The way he'd twitched up when asked about a military sniper made Nick nervous. Were the feds looking for a nutcase off the reservation of a military base? Had someone from the VA with a trigger finger gone wacky? Figuring no other media outlet was even aware of the feds' involvement, Nick decided to work the angle a few days, call a friend at the local FBI office. He might have just put it off as some weapons-tracing program ATF was running, but that wouldn't "fast-track" this specific investigation as Canfield had explained. And he sure as hell wouldn't have prompted the Sheriff's Office into letting a journalist like Nick into the inner circle. Something was humming on a higher level and he put it on his priority list to find out where Fitzgerald had come from.

After maxing out the story at exactly sixteen inches, Nick read it through one more time for spelling of names and attributions, made an electronic copy for himself and with a touch of a button shipped it to his editor. He slid his chair back and looked over at the metro desk to let him know and saw a knot of folks, including his man, an assignment editor and a woman from the photo department having a close conversation. This sort of gathering was always ominous, and ninety-nine percent of the time they'd end their little conclave by looking for someone to do something for them.

Nick pulled his chair back up to his desk and gave full concentration to his keyboard. It was seven thirty. He wanted to go home. He needed to be with Carly. Friday nights had been set aside for movies and popcorn and he'd been mostly true to that. He'd made a lot of those promises after the accident. He'd been guilty of not showing up on Friday nights, working big weekend pieces for the Sunday edition. He'd shortchanged his family. He hadn't been there when they needed him.

When he took a chance and glanced over at the group, the photo editor was shaking her head and walking away. The assignment guy was looking at his watch. And Nick's editor just shrugged his shoulders and headed Nick's way.

"Hey, Nick. How's that piece coming?"

"Pretty close," Nick said. He hated lying. He'd always hated lying.

"Good, man. 'Cause we've got a situation."

Nick pushed his chair back. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. There's a multicar accident out on 1-95 down near the Hollywood Boulevard exit and, you know, traffic is hell and backed up all the way to the Dade County line."

"Injuries?" Nick said, letting a forced passivity mask his face.

"Yeah. But we don't know how serious. We've got a couple of reporters on their way."

Nick had done this dance a couple of times since he'd come back to work, and he felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy. But he was a police reporter. It was still what he did and in his business death was a regular staple of the news cycle.

"Those guys will do the scene, Nick, so we don't need you to go out there, OK?" the editor quickly said, trying to soften it. "But we're going to need you to do rewrite, you know, so we can try to make deadline with it."

"Yeah, sure. OK," Nick said, turning his chair and bellying back up to his keyboard. "Just give 'em my extension. I'll take the feeds." He did not look back at the editor's face and instead focused on the screen in front of him.

"And I'll ship this other piece to you in a minute."

"Thanks, Nick. I mean, you know, thanks."

Nick waved him off and let his fingertips start snapping at the keys. He called up a street schematic of the accident location on MapQuest. He tried to visualize the businesses and major landmarks along that stretch of interstate from memory. But the scenes in his head kept jumping back to December, two years ago. Christmas decorations on the pods around him. Diane Lade with her inevitable miniature tree on top of her computer terminal. An editor's voice: "Nick, we got some kind of wreck up in Deerfield Beach. Somebody T-boned a family van. Sounds like it might be a good story."

His ringing phone snapped him back.

"Hey, Nick. Kevin Davis-I hear you're doing rewrite?"

"Yeah, Kev. You out there yet?"

"Just got here. Man, the traffic is way backed up. It looks like four or five cars from here. The location is about two hundred yards north of the Sterling Road on-ramp in the northbound lanes. I'll call you back when I get up there and see what's what."

Nick hung up and went back to his screen and tried to block out Christmas Eve.

He'd been wishing only that the night would end so he could go home and help lay out presents for his kids. He was looking for the swirl of blue cop lights and red ambulance strobes. He was walking up to the scene smelling the odor of raw gasoline and burnt rubber and recognized a motor patrolman he knew as a friend but was puzzled by the look on the guy's face. He got a glance at the wreckage in the middle of the intersection. Steel twisting in the shine of headlights. Maroon color. Same as his own van.

"Hey, Nick?" The photo editor's voice turned his head as she approached. "We've got this digital stuff that Lou got from the accident scene."

She laid the printed photos on his desk.

"He's sending them in from his laptop so we can make deadline. Thought maybe they'd help if you, like, needed a visual to put the story together."

Nick nodded, thanked her, but when she turned to go he shoved the prints over to the corner of his desk, partway under a stack of old newspapers.

In between the front of a squad car and the back end of a rescue vehicle he focused on a torn fiberglass bumper that had been split in two and could make out the jagged crease across a University of Florida Gator sticker that his wife had jokingly stuck on their bumper just a few weeks earlier and he felt the constriction, like a knot of physical fear, rising up to choke him. He took three more steps toward the wreckage before his friend the patrolman could get to him and the view opened up to reveal a yellow sheet, that fucking yellow sheet, already spread over something in the road. He could feel someone's arms wrapping around his shoulders, more cops, more hands holding him back, and then he felt the rip of sound and pain that scorched the back of his throat when he started screaming.

"Hey, Nick, it's Kevin," the voice said and Nick realized that somehow he'd picked up the ringing phone without thinking about it.

"Yeah." Nick managed to cough out a response.

"Hey, man, you alright?"

Nick was staring out into the newsroom, seeing something he could not banish from the inside of his head.

"Yeah," he finally said into the phone. "I'm alright."

"OK, this is a bad one out here. They say the FHP investigator is on his way, so we're going to have to wait on the particulars 'cause they want everything to come through him. But from what I can tell we got at least two dead, maybe more. So I think we're going to send Lisa Browne over to Hollywood Memorial to check on victims over there, and maybe she can get some I.D.s from folks there. I'll just camp out here."

"Yeah, OK. That's cool," Nick said. "Give me what you've got so far."

He crooked the phone between his shoulder and ear and put his fingers on the keyboard to take dictation.

"You ready?"

"Yeah," Nick said. "Go ahead." He got home at eleven thirty, came through the front door tired and drained. Elsa was on the couch, lightly snoring as a Spanish-language soap opera played low on the television and flooded the open room with a blue glow. Nick covered her with an afghan and then went to check on Carly. In his daughter's room he stood in the darkness until his eyes adjusted and he could see her pale skin against the pillow, her mom's profile, her mouth slightly open, and he was somehow soothed by the sound of her breath rhythmically sighing in and out. He sat down carefully and reached out and just with the tips of his fingers he moved a strand of hair off her cheek and lightly stroked her head. He used to play a game after the girls fell asleep in which he tried to match his breathing to the beat of theirs and found that he could never keep up with the air that filled and emptied from their tiny lungs. He tried that now, and then curled up on the end of his daughter's bed and closed his eyes with the odor of her comforter in his nose and fell deeply asleep.